Michael Heller (poet)
Michael Heller (born May 11, 1937) is an American poet, essayist and critic. Life Heller has published over 20 volumes of poetry, essays, memoir, and fiction. Multimedia collaborations with composer Ellen Fishman Johnson include the opera, Constellations of Waking (on Walter Benjamin) and This Art Burning.This Constellation Is A Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010, Nightboat Books. Web, May 12, 2018. Writing Throughout his career, Michael Heller has addressed contemporary avant-garde movements, Jewish and post-Holocaust poetry, poetics, and the literary environment of contemporary poetry. His is a style and gesture seen as joining personal tone with historic incident while reflecting on such themes as the nature of language, poetry, religion, and even memory itself. Heller's interests often point to a succession of American poetry that today is, for the most part, inflected by the American experimentalism of Walt Whitman and the "make it new" of innovators such as Pound and Williams along with infusions of European dada, surrealism, structuralist and post-structuralist thought. "Aspects of Poetics," an important statement by Heller on his aesthetics, appeared in Samizdat in 2001. A recent book of essays, Uncertain Poetries (2005), deals with the uncertain nature of 20th-century poetry. In his preface to the volume, Heller refers to these pieces as "selected from nearly twenty-five years of work (and) ought to be read as something of an intellectual biography of a working poet". They address Heller's on-going dialogue and confrontation with such major figures as Williams, Pound, Stevens, Marianne Moore, George Oppen, Robert Duncan, Lorine Niedecker, Lorca, Rilke, and Mallarmé, along with poets in more contemporary modernist and postmodernist lineages. Heller himself notes that: :there is no question that the tenor of contemporary civilization is marked by its uncertainty, its hesitant mood on matters both cultural and political. Poetry, ever sensitive to the nuances of its surroundings, must limn or bode forth the environmental conditions out of which it arises. That poets, those presumed antennae of the race, might be picking up the signals and putting them somehow into the work seems only too obvious. Michael Heller site at Salt Publishing If the concepts of uncertainty, disease, and anomie embody the condition of modernity itself ---as critics have also noted--- they also animate Heller's work. Concurrently, various commentators now recognize Heller's contribution to our understanding of how, although the poet embodies the exigencies of modernity, so to the poetic act can become an active shaping force which, through the charged field of poetic language, provides the hope of meaning for both history and experience. Objectivist poetics Heller is recognized as a leading expert on Objectivist poets, poetry, and poetics. The impetus for his continued interest in this particular group of poets began with his discovery of the poetry of George Oppen (and with whom he began a correspondence in the 1960s). Today Heller is acknowledged by some readers and critics as a Jewish Objectivist poet in the tradition of Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, and Louis Zukofsky. Recognition His critical book on the Objectivist poets, Conviction’s Net of Branches, received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. His many other awards include a New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities Poet/Scholar Award, and the Fund for Poetry. A collection of essays on his work, The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: Nomad memory, was published in 2015. Publications Poetry *''Accidental Center. Sumac Press, 1972. *''Knowledge. 1980. *''In the Builded Place''. Coffee House Press, 1989. *''Wordflow: New and selected poems''. Talisman House, 1997. *''Exigent Futures: New and selected poems''. Salt Publishing, 2003. *''Eschaton''. Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 2009. *''This Constellation is a Name: Collected poems 1965-2010''. Nightboat, 2012.This Constellation is a Name: Collected poems 1965-2010 (paperback). Amazon.com, Web, Feb. 21, 2013. Non-fiction *''Conviction's Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry'' (Southern Illinois University Press, 1985); criticism *''Living Root: A memoir''. SUNY Press, 2000. *''Uncertain Poetries : Selected essays on poets, poetry and poetics''. Salt Publishing, 2005. *''Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the work of George Oppen''. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2008 Edited *''Carl Rakosi: Man and poet''. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1993. See also *Objectivist poets *List of U.S. poets References External links ;Poems *Michael Heller: A Survey at Light & Dust Anthology of Poetry (selections from entire range of Heller's work) ;Books *Michael Heller at Amazon.com ;About *Michael Heller Official website *Interview with Heller in September 1998 *Will to Exchange: Heller Interviewed by Thomas Fink in January 2006 *[http://www.jacketmagazine.com/25/pritt-helle.html Patrick Pritchett reviews Exigent Futures] @ Jacket Magazine website *[http://www.jacketmagazine.com/28/curl-hell.html Jon Curley reviews Uncertain Poetries] @ Jacket Magazine website Richard Klin reviews Living Root; the Forward (2002) Category:American poets Category:Living people Category:1937 births Category:Objectivist poets Category:20th-century poets Category:21st-century poets Category:English-language poets Category:Poets